Power has historically taken on different meanings and functions. For Max Weber, power is merely instrumental, whereas Hannah Arendt sees it as communicative, and Michel Foucault as strategic. Although power is traditionally defined as essentially repressive and negative, I will argue along the lines of...

Lenin and Weber hold different views on the state, and explore the pitfalls and praises of democracy through their respective paradigms. In Weber’s Politics as a Vocation he takes a militant view of the state, claiming that if the notion of violence and militantism did...